Women Rule speakers announced

POLITICO, Google and the Tory Burch Foundation are pleased to announce that Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) and “House of Cards” creator and writer Beau Willimon will be among our featured speakers at the first Women Rule event of 2014. Our Tuesday event — “How Women Run: Power, Perception and Reality” — will explore the challenges of women in political campaigns, as well as how powerful, political women are portrayed in political culture.

Screenwriter and playwright Beau Willimon — one of the most sought-after talents of his generation — is the creator of the hot (and diabolical!) Netflix series “House of Cards.”

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The show earned nine Emmy and four Golden Globe nominations, the first online streaming program to be so recognized. “House of Cards” won the WGA Award for Best New Series. Willimon is also showrunner and primary writer for the hugely popular political series starring Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright as duplicitous politicians.

When asked about the dark nature of the politicians in the series, Willimon said: “All politicians are murderers or have to be willing to be murderers. Here you have a dramatization of that thing in them which allows them to do the unspeakable, whether that is facilitating the death of a congressman or sending 100,000 troops to war.”

Willimon, 36, first won international acclaim when his play “Farragut North” was adapted to the political film “The Ides of March,” directed by and starring George Clooney. “The Ides of March” earned the writer Academy Award, Golden Globe and BAFTA nominations. His newest play, “Breathing Time,” will premiere in New York in the spring.

On Tuesday, he will talk about how women are portrayed in popular culture and address whether the ruthless political women portrayed in “House of Cards” reflect his firsthand experiences in the political arena.

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Kirsten Gillibrand, a Democratic senator from New York since 2009, has made changing how the military justice system deals with sexual assault a centerpiece of her legislative agenda.

A member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, she has pushed to have such cases removed from the military’s chain of command — a solution embraced by victims and fought by the military leadership.

This month — after a year of fiery debate — the Senate defeated her bill, which would have upended how the military handles assault cases.

“There are many issues on which Sen. Gillibrand and I disagree,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), a tea party favorite, has said, “but on the issue of sexual assaults in the military, she has been a courageous leader.”

Gillibrand was first elected to the House in 2006. Shortly after her successful reelection, she was appointed by New York Gov. David Patterson to fill the seat vacated by Hillary Clinton when Clinton was named secretary of state. She has since been elected to the seat twice. She is first senator to post online her schedule, financial disclosures and federal earmark requests.

Before entering politics, Gillibrand was a practicing attorney at Davis Polk & Wardwell in New York City. She is the mother of two children.

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Leticia Van de Putte is the other woman from Texas running for statewide office who has quietly emerged as a strong Hispanic force across party lines both at home and nationally.

A pharmacist, Democratic state senator and mother of six, Van de Putte is running for lieutenant governor — but emphasizes she didn’t get in the race to play second fiddle to controversial gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis. “Let’s face it,” she told an interviewer, “her campaign has had a tough couple of months … I did not put my name in the lieutenant governor race because I want to help Wendy.”

Van de Putte generated national attention last June when she repeatedly tried to get recognized on the Senate floor after Davis’s now-famous filibuster.

“Did the president hear me or did the president hear me and refuse to recognize me?” Van de Putte asked. “At what point must a female senator raise her hand or her voice to be recognized over her male colleagues?” The chamber cheered.

She has served as president of the National Conference of State Legislatures and the National Hispanic Caucus of State Legislators. She is a strong advocate for children, the armed forces and their families, public education and economic development.

She said she is running because she is fed up with the GOP’s toxic language on immigration reform.

Rep. Martha Roby (R-Ala.) is serving her second term in the House of Representatives. She and Democrat Terri Sewell were the first women elected to Congress from Alabama in regular elections.

Roby identifies herself as staunch conservative who believes in the sanctity of life, the protection of the Second Amendment and limited government. “I believe that we should live within our means, and I believe in the central role of faith and family in our lives,” she said.

Her official biography notes that early in her service in Congress, Rep. Roby “has distinguished herself as an effective legislator and messenger for the conservative cause.” As chairwoman of the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, Roby has made the treatment of women and girls in Afghanistan a primary focus of the committee’s work.

Roby, a mother of two, pushed the Working Families Flexibility Act to House passage, a measure that would allow workers to take time off in lieu of overtime. The bill died in the Senate.

Roby sat on the Agriculture Committee for three years and played a significant role in the recently enacted farm bill. She now sits on the Appropriations Committee.

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Kellyanne Conway is founder and president of the polling company, inc./WomanTrend, a privately held, woman-owned corporation founded in 1995. She is the co-author of “What Women Really Want: How American Women Are Quietly Erasing Political, Racial, Class, and Religious Lines to Change the Way We Live.”

Throughout her two decades in market research, Conway has provided primary research and advice for clients in 46 of 50 states and has directed hundreds of demographic and attitudinal survey projects for largely Republican statewide and congressional political races.

She has worked for Vice President Dan Quayle, Sen. Fred Thompson, Gov. Mike Pence, and Reps. Michele Bachmann and Steve King. She was a senior adviser and pollster for Newt Gingrich’s 2012 presidential campaign. She also was an adviser to Missouri Rep. Todd Akin during his bid for a Senate seat when he famously stated that women who are victims of “legitimate rape” rarely get pregnant because “the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”

Conway is a lawyer and is admitted to practice in Maryland, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and the District of Columbia. She has practiced law, clerked for a judge in Washington and for four years was an adjunct professor at The George Washington University Law Center.

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Robbie Myers has been editor in chief of ELLE since 2000. Myers is responsible for content creation across all brand platforms, which have a readership of 8 million people. Under Meyers’s direction, the magazine has been touted as a women’s publication that is strong on both style and substance. She got her start in the business by picking up the phone to call Jann Wenner, the founder of Rolling Stone, and was hired within a week. Last year, she stepped up to staunchly defend women’s magazines when The New Republic sought to denigrate them, in a piece titled “Can Women’s Magazines Do Serious Journalism?”

“The question alone ghettoizes us,” she retorted. “One, all women’s magazines aren’t the same. We have different readers, we have different complex missions. … Basically, if you’re saying women’s magazines don’t care about good writing, you’re saying women don’t [either], because that’s who reads women’s magazines.”